Major Arcana · 0
Air · א Aleph · Thoth: The Fool
A new cycle opens and the only way in is to step forward without knowing where you will land. Trust the impulse, but look at where your feet are.
Aleph, the ox, is the first letter and the first of the three Mothers. It is silent: a breath, a glottal stop, the sound before sound. The Sepher Yetzirah makes the three Mothers Aleph, Mem and Shin into Air, Water and Fire; Air, “the scale of merit and the scale of guilt, and the tongue of decree deciding between them”, is the balance between Water and Fire. Its value is 1, and spelled in full (אלף) it is 111. The shape is often read as two Yods joined by a Vav: the upper and lower waters divided by the firmament.
The 11th path joins Kether to Chokmah: it is the first motion out of the One, the breath of the spirit before any form. The Golden Dawn calls it the path of the Spirit of Æther, and it is the first of the paths of the Lightning Flash after it leaves Kether.
Pamela Colman Smith’s Fool is a young man in a flowered tunic stepping off a cliff edge with a white rose in one hand and a wand and wallet over his shoulder, a small white dog leaping at his heels and the sun blazing behind him. Waite calls him “the spirit in search of experience”. Case reads the cliff as the edge of manifestation, the white rose as purified desire, the wallet as the stored memories of the race, and the dog as the intellect that follows the spirit.
Lady Frieda Harris painted Crowley’s Fool as the Green Man of spring, horned like Dionysus Zagreus and Bacchus Diphues, with a crocodile (Sebek, Harpocrates’ beast) in the water at his feet, a tiger fawning at his thigh, and a dove, vulture and butterfly in the spiral caduceus of his whirling movement. He carries a cluster of grapes and a burning pine-cone, and the sun-disc of Hoor-pa-kraat. Crowley calls him the Holy Fool, Parsifal the pure fool, the Great Fool of the Celts, and the “Babe in the Egg of Blue”.
Éliphas Lévi, in Dogme et Rituel (1855), gave the Fool to Shin and put the Magician on Aleph. The Golden Dawn’s Cipher Manuscripts moved the Fool, number zero, to the head of the sequence, so that Aleph, the first letter, carries the card of nothing-before-one. Nearly every English-language occult tarot follows the Golden Dawn.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).